Rhythm is key to language acquisition. Across languages, rhythmic features highlight fundamental linguistic elements of the sound stream and structural relations among them. A sensitivity to rhythmic features, which begins in utero, is evident at birth. What is less clear is whether rhythm supports infants' earliest links between language and cognition. Prior evidence has documented that for infants as young as 3 and 4 months, listening to their native language supports the core cognitive capacity of object categorization. This precocious link (...) is initially part of a broader template: listening to a non-native language from the same rhythmic class as and to vocalizations of non-human primates provide English-acquiring infants the same cognitive advantage as does listening to their native language. Here, we implement a machine-learning approach to ask whether there are acoustic properties, available on the surface of these vocalizations, that permit infants' to identify which vocalizations are candidate links to cognition. We provided the model with a robust sample of vocalizations that, from the vantage point of English-acquiring 4-month-olds, either support object categorization or fail to do so. We assess whether supervised ML classification models can distinguish those vocalizations that support cognition from those that do not, and which class of acoustic features best support that classification. Our analysis reveals that principal components derived from rhythm-relevant acoustic features were among the most robust in supporting the classification. Classifications performed using temporal envelope components were also robust. These new findings provide in principle evidence that infants' earliest links between vocalizations and cognition may be subserved by their perceptual sensitivity to rhythmic and spectral elements available on the surface of these vocalizations, and that these may guide infants' identification of candidate links to cognition. (shrink)

Questions about concepts bring into play all the cognitive science disciplines. For many centuries, concepts belonged to philosophy; but more recently, these original caretakers have shared responsibility for this domain with cognitive and developmental psychology, linguistics, artificial intelligence, anthropology, and neuroscience. Each of these fields has offered insights into these building blocks of thought, and each has contributed a unique perspective on fundamental questions about the nature of minds. However, the integrative approach of cognitive science holds the promise of providing (...) new vantage points from a range of disciplines on this core issue. (shrink)

Infants are endowed with a proclivity to acquire language, whether it is presented in the auditory or visual modality. Moreover, in the first months of life, listening to language supports fundamental cognitive capacities, including infants’ facility to form object categories. Recently, we have found that for English-acquiring infants as young as 4 months of age, this precocious interface between language and cognition is sufficiently broad to include not only their native spoken language, but also sign language. In the current study, (...) we take this work one step further, asking how “sign-naïve” infants—hearing infants with no prior exposure to sign language—deploy their attentional and social strategies in the context of episodes involving either spoken or sign language. We adopted a now-standard categorization task, presenting 4- to 6-month-old infants with a series of exemplars from a single category. Each exemplar was introduced by a woman who appeared on the screen together with the object. What varied across conditions was whether this woman introduced the exemplar by speaking or signing. We coded infants’ visual attentional strategies and their spontaneous vocalizations during this task. Infants’ division of attention and visual switches between the woman and exemplar varied as a function of language modality. In contrast, infants’ spontaneous vocalizations revealed similar patterns across languages. These results, which advance our understanding of how infants allocate attentional resources and engage with communicative partners across distinct modalities, have implications for specifying our theories of language acquisition. (shrink)

Evidence from language acquisition suggests that words are powerful mechanisms in the acquisition of substance concepts. Infants initially approach language with the general expectation that words refer to real kinds, regardless of grammatical cues to the contrary.

Bloom provides a masterful synthesis of recent advances in word-learning, placing them within the framework of abiding theoretical issues. I will augment and challenge his approach by underscoring the significance of word extension for questions concerning (a) the origin and evolution of infants' expectations, and (b) domain-specificity in word-learning.